Fish Catching Tips
1.Chip up frozen chum into golf ball sized pieces if fresh is unavailable.
2.Stop the cage before it gets all the way to the bottom. This will enable you to bring smaller snappers, triggers, etc., off the bottom. You can then target them with light tackle, and still use heavier tackle for bottom dwelling grouper.
3.Anchor your boat up tide from wrecks when using the cages. The chum will draw the fish out away from the wrecks, where you will have far less cut offs.
4.Empty bleach bottles will collapse after you wind the cage up a few times. To prevent this get a can of aerosol foam at any hardware store, and fill the empty bottle about 2/3 full. Don't fill them all the way up, (or put the cap on before it cures) as the foam expands as it cures, and will blow the bottle up. The cages will also work well attached to a stout boat rod.
CHUM FACTS
1) For every knot of current, water moves 100' per minute.
2) Chopped up chum (depending on whether it's fresh or frozen) sinks at an average rate of 15' per minute.
3) Example: if you are fishing in 90' of water with only a 1 knot current, that hand full of chum you toss over won't hit bottom until it's 600 feet behind your boat.
4) DEEP DROP CAGES sink at a rate of over 20 feet per second . Your chum ends up directly under your boat.where it belongs.
HOW TO USE A DEEP DROP CAGE
1. Attach the cage to some heavy mono wrapped around a bleach bottle, then fill cage with desired amount of chum.
2. With the open end of the cage pointing up, toss it over. Water pressure keeps the chum in the cage, so its very important to make sure it gets to the bottom with out stopping. The cage will land on the bottom with the leaded end down. At that point simply give the line a tug and the chum will be released.
Why weighted cages work best
The purpose of chumming is to bring fish up-current to you. One way is to use mesh chum bags with weights attached to them. For this method to work on grouper, snapper, and other bottom fish, the bag must remain down, so the chum can gradually defrost and draw the fish to you. The downside here is that you have a line suspended from your boat that hooked fish can get tangled up in, and ultimately lost.
DEEP DROP CAGES are brought up immediately after each use, so there is no chance of losing fish because they got tangled up in the line attached to the chum bag
Another way of chumming is to simply toss chopped up chum overboard. This works great for surface feeding fish, but has severe shortcomings for fish that feed in other parts of the water column.
You can control exactly where in the water column to release your chum with a DEEP DROP CAGE.